Julie Powell on Julia Child's Enduring Style

Julia Child cared more about hot dishes than fashion plates, but as blogger Julie Powell, who spent a year emulating her cooking, learned, the lady had style.

For the past seven years, Julia Child has been one of the most important people in my life. That might seem odd, seeing as she died in 2004 and I never met the woman. But I did spend an arduous, exhilarating, and life-changing year living inside her groundbreaking Mastering the Art of French Cooking, re-creating all of its 524 recipes. And, presumptuous as it may seem, I now think of the two of us as intimates of a sort.

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Other cookbooks have attained the status of masterpiece; Escoffier's Ma Cuisine and Irma Rombauer's The Joy of Cooking come to mind. But I can think of no other that manages to so perfectly encapsulate a spirit and personality — and what a personality! When Mastering the Art of French Cooking was first published in 1961 (incidentally, two years before Julia's fellow Smith College graduate Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique), it changed the face of the American culinary landscape dramatically by introducing a generation to not just authentic French cuisine but a new approach to cooking in general — rigorous, exotic, and brave. But Mastering did more, even, than that. It introduced us to an extraordinary individual — a great cook and teacher, most famously; a great writer, which has been somewhat less remarked upon; and also a (literally) towering example of how a woman can, with work and attention to what feels truly important, transform herself. Mastering contains no biographical information; Julia was much too concerned with her passion for teaching the "servantless American cook" how to create fine French food to indulge in personal chatter. Yet somehow it comes shining through in the book's pages that this was the sort of woman who could plunge her bare hands into boiling water or stun a live lobster with one decisive whack, a woman who had no use for words like inappropriate and impossible. Though Julia never attached any such labels to herself, for me Mastering the Art of French Cooking is the work of not only a culinary icon but also a feminist one.

Now, feminist icons are not universally known for their cunning fashion choices, and Julia was never what you'd call a clotheshorse. A funny, fierce, six-foot-two force of nature, she tended to dress as for battle — this perhaps a holdover from her war years, spent working for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services — in button-up shirts with rolled-up sleeves, simple straight skirts or slacks, and sensible shoes, with an apron tied around her waist and, always, a dish towel tucked into her waistband. In her decades on television, she never really varied her hairstyle or her look. Of course, that was part of her charm and part of the reason — along with her unmistakable diction — she is so instantly, universally recognizable. She found what worked for her and stuck with it.

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Like Rosie the Riveter, forever baring her arm in her coveralls and kerchief, reminding us that we can do it, timelessness has always been part of Julia's power. Her wide-collared blouses and trusty dish towels are essential components of all those ingrained memories of loopy lectures on chickens and cheerful admonishments to "never apologize."

Julia was blessed with appetite, curiosity, and nearly superhuman stamina, and while fashionable attire was never her distinguishing characteristic, style was something she had in spades. Long before she became famous as the first honest-to-god celebrity chef, long before she even knew how to cook — which wasn't until she was well into her 30s — Julia McWilliams Child was a woman who knew how to make an entrance. Her husband, Paul Child, adored her for her wit, her booming laugh, and her brimming enthusiasms.

A sophisticated man, Paul introduced Julia to great food, to art and culture, but the ardor with which she embraced these was entirely her own. As difficult as it is to imagine such a Paul Bunyan-esque legend experiencing doubt, I know that Julia must have from time to time. But she never let things get her down for long. And once she discovered her great passion for food — cooking it, eating it, sharing it — she spent the rest of her life applying her astonishing arsenal of charm, wit, grit, and sheer vocal volume to the mission of passing that passion on to as many people as possible. She inspired thousands of women (and men) hungry for change through the conduit of beautiful, authentic, sensuous food.

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Decades later, she inspired me, a then-29-year-old secretary with little notion of herself or what her own future might hold in store. Mastering practically dared me to fling myself elbow deep into pâtés and bread dough, to sweat and scurry, to risk physical harm and more than occasional humiliation. Julia's zeal didn't just encourage me to cook; it gave me the confidence to redefine just who and what and how much I could be.

It's hard to know what Julia Child would make of the American food scene today. Between the can-opener chefs (those who, much as '50s-era cookbooks did, use convenience foods and short cuts to lure couch potatoes to enter the kitchen at all) and the porn chefs (who use fancy ingredients and tricked-out lenses to concoct images of food clearly designed to awe and entertain rather than nourish), it sometimes seems there is no honest middle way a peripatetic doer and sympathetic teacher like Julia would fully approve of. Too, Julia was disinclined to second-guess herself; as with her wardrobe, her opinions tended to remain unchanged. Current fixations on exotic combinations and obsessions with superlocal everything might annoy her.

Then again, Julia was, to the last, capable of change. I read somewhere a few years ago that Julia, at the age of 89 or 90, had, after 50 years of extolling the necessity of clarifying butter, done a 180 on the matter, declaring that she'd decided it wasn't worth the trouble. I personally wish she'd had that particular change of heart before I got through my year of painstakingly clarifying (and often burning) butter for all those Mastering recipes. But what better exemplification of the lesson Julia has taught me could there be?

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Own who you are, but know that who you are can always change. To the last.

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